No it wasn’t us who thought of this first. It was a piece in that brilliant mag New Scientist which first gave us this jaw-dropping moment. There may be a link between the digestive system-what we eat, how we prepare it and what else lives in it-and mental health. Maybe, just may be the researchers in this frontier field may be on the edge of finding causal mechanisms for some mental disorders. Some at least. We have started to cover this topos (don’t you love that word?)in several blogs since 2022, with growing enthusiasm. In this spirit we present this latest from Nature Briefing A gut feeling about mental health

Preliminary evidence suggests that nurturing the gut microbiota could help to resolve depression and anxiety, whether through faecal transplant, probiotics or diet. Two 2016 studies showed that transferring faecal matter from someone with depression into rodents gave the animals depression-like behaviors. “This is not how we’d thought about mental illness, as something that can be transferred the way you could catch measles,” says psychiatrist Valerie Taylor. Now researchers are working to untangle how the microbiota influence various human illnesses throughout the gut-brain axis — including effects on the immune system, the vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system.Nature Outlook | 12 min read
This editorially independent article is part of Nature Outlook: The human microbiome, a supplement produced with financial support from Yakult.

But we stress several things. Firstly, it’s early days. All too often people get carried away by excitement, and lose their grip on evidence and reason. But LSS staff and readers are above the level of mental level of conspiracy theory enthusiasts! Correlation does not prove causation, we say gentle readers. That said, the earnest and thorough research around things like neural super highways, neurotransmitter production, microbiome and mood and faecal microbiota transplants has excited our curiosity to the utmost. Next time you see one of those poor devils on the street, their life wrecked by mental disorder, think this: is their hope that one day, at least, this may never happen again?

#mental health #gut #microbiome #digestive system #schizophrenia #blood brain barrier